John Liu’s interests include the role of the courts and judicial behavior, as well as law and development. He uses the methods of the data sciences and economics to study these topics. His present research projects include work that takes advantage of large dataset of judicial opinions in China to analyze and predict judges’ decisions and public reactions; using statistical methods to estimate judicial transparency in China; studying law and development with a combination of court data and economic data in China; and performing experimental studies to reveal the hidden behavioral patterns of judges. As a legal scholar who uses AI and big data in research, his interests also extend to the emerging role of AI and big data and their regulation. His work has appeared in a number of academic journals that specialize in law and in China studies, including Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Legal Analysis, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, International Review of Law and Economics, American Journal of Comparative Law, and China Quarterly.

He teaches business law and economic regulations, law and economics, empirical studies of law, and law and data sciences. He received a Bachelor of Laws and a PhD in Law from Peking University, as well as an LLM and a JSD from the University of Chicago. After graduation, he joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and is currently on leave. He helped establish the legal big data group at the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, which conducts research using judicial decision data from China.

In 2021, he plans to develop a structural database of Chinese court decisions in contract cases and criminal cases, aiding scholars who seek to conduct empirical study of the Chinese legal system. Along with this line of work, he is also constructing indices to measure judicial transparency and judicial performance in China at the county or district level. Collaboration with this work is welcome.